Exploitative Commercials in Children’s TV Programming Essay -- Media T

Alcohol. Obesity. Violence. For kids today in the United States, these are only a few of the problems linked to the child-targeted mass media, especially the multi- trillion dollar business video recording commercials in childrens programming. With the disappearance of a TV-free environment, a typical American kid sees about 40,000 television advertisements all(prenominal) year, most of which are for soda, candy, video games, fast food and their free toys. In order to collect some information, I sat down on a Saturday morning on July 16, 2004, and recorded several kids TV ads for tho analysis. Needless to say, the results were quite shockingaside from the obvious, I also discover that most ads featured active and aggressive boys while the presence of girls was seldom to be seen. Being a girl myself, I felt the submit to take a close look at such inequality. I began to wonder if commercialism has overlooked the importance of gender issues, which would then make be lieve negative impacts on children by sending out harmful hugger-mugger messages. For example, these ads can promote a polarization of gender roles that portray the sexes in stereotypical and traditional ways, which will unconsciously affect young viewing audience attitudes and values. In his article written in 1988, What Are TV Ads merchandising to Children, John J. OConnor asserts, Things havent changed much in the television business of childrens merchandising, and some aspects of the scene are even much appalling. Indeed, though not as prevalent as in previous years, TV commercials aimed at kids still contain underlying themes such as sexism thats extremely harmful to the development of the youth. Stereotypical images permeate kids television commercials, giving young chi... ...eyre being preached of becoming the gentle, pretty, sensitive and domesticated dream-girls who are submissive to boys. It is as if females lives revolve around males. On the former(a) han d, boys tend to get the wrong impression that men have to be physically strong, competitive, rational and superior to women. As illustrated by stereotypes, roles, and representation, boys always reckon to be the winner in the unequal gender portrayal on kids TV commercials. Many kids try to emulate such characteristics from role-models they see on the screen, which can be very misleading and harmful, for they hinder the development of childrens innate talents and abilities. As OConnor indicates, Commercials in childrens programming are consumptive and a disservice to society. Despite recent improvement, sexism remains to be a major problem in the child-targeted commercialism.